Black History and First Parish on Bedford Common ~ Nanne’s Life Matters

February 20, 2020
First Parish Senior Minister John Gibbons and parishioner Renae Nichols (r) read from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates during the service: “Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.”

 

In a Sunday morning service on February 2, at the start of Black History Month,  First Parish Unitarian Universalist on Bedford Common dedicated a small new plaque. It remembers a woman named Nanne and is installed beneath a memorial to Bedford’s first minister, Nicholas Bowes, her owner.

First Parish and Town Historian Sharon Lawrence McDonald set a context for the service by reflecting on the history of slavery in Massachusetts. “Slavery was quite legal in Massachusetts colony. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in the ‘Body of Liberties’ of 1641: There shall never be any bond slavery, villainage or captivity amongst us unless it be lawful Captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us.

“This was amended in 1670,’ she continued, “to say that children born of a mother who is enslaved will also be slaves. The Bedford Tax Valuation of 1771 listed seven ‘servants for life.'”

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Click this link to read the full text of Sharon Lawrence McDonald’s remarks

In his sermon, Senior Minister John Gibbons said, “We meet on this Town Common, made historic as the mustering ground for the Minuteman who fought in the American Revolution on behalf of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — for white, propertied men.

“Bedford’s first minister was Nicholas Bowes, and he lived just over there on Great Road in the Domine Manse,” Gibbons continued, “He lived there with his family, and with a young woman whom Bowes had purchased and enslaved as his servant.  Her seldom-spoken name was Nanne.  Her name was Nanne and she was enslaved.”

In remembrance of the complicated history that Bowes and Nanne share with First Parish, rosemary sprigs were passed among the pews “We see you, we recognize ourselves in you, your history is our history,’ noted Gibbons, “we are connected, we will not forget, we remember. ”

Slavery during the American Revolution

In another nod to the history of slavery in Colonial times, Gibbons added, “Only recently have I learned that one of the many causes of the American Revolution was the defense of slavery.  You know, that isn’t much mentioned in our history books or on Patriots or Pole Capping Days….

“Colonial officials encouraged enslaved people to seek their freedom by fleeing to British lines.  Many of the enslaved came to see the struggle as one between their freedom and their continued subjugation.

“In the 1775 Dunsmore Proclamation, the governor of Virginia offered freedom to any enslaved person who fled their plantation and joined the British Army. Historian Jill Lepore writes, ‘Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was Dunsmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.’

“New England’s obvious and much-celebrated industry – think of the cotton mills of Lowell and Lawrence – was entirely dependent on and complicit with the enslavement of black Africans.

“White supremacy was enforced by de jure and de facto segregation, and it is no accident that these suburbs, even unto the present day, are predominantly white and wealthy, due to red-lining by realtors and the post-WWII exclusion of African-Americans from the benefits of the GI Bill.

“There is a subterranean hidden history to Bedford and these suburbs and our country – and our world. ”

Editor’s Note: Gibbons later said he learned of this heretofore little-known history via The 1619 Project published by The New York Times in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.

Connecting the Past and the Present and That Which Goes Unseen

Gibbons raised the issue of what often goes unnoticed in today’s world, quoting James Baldwin who said, “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”

He went on to say, “This is not just a sermon about the poison of white supremacy that still laces our water. This is not just a sermon about Nanne, nor is it just about Bowes – whom we do not castigate for, ‘first, we must remove the beam out of our own eye, and then we may see clearly to remove the speck out of our brother’s eye.’

“Rather, this is a sermon about all that is under-land and unseen, the aspects of ourselves to which we are blind or willfully ignorant.”

Connecting the past to the present, Gibbons declared, “But, you know, such revelation is what we as a faith community are about or what we should be about all the time: Here we reveal and unveil that which is hidden or to which we have been willfully ignorant.  Here together we try to reveal the truth about ourselves, individually, systemically, collectively.  We expose the cruelty of family separation, the sins of and prejudice and greed and corruption, the chasm of inequalities; we lament and confess how we ourselves fall short of the admonitions of conscience and spirit.  We are not the people we want to be.

“Here, too, we affirm that hope abides, that there is health in us, and that while prayer may not change a thing, prayer does change people, and people change things, and thus we pray for the coming of the apocalypse, and for revival in each and every one of us, that we may more clearly see.

“This is a sermon about humility, a sermon about recognizing and confessing all that we do not know.  A sermon that asks the question, “Who is not in this room?”  Young people, old people, people of color, people of differing abilities and genders and addictions, and opinions?

“Yes, we too often speak in an echo chamber.  How might we see and hear and feel those not in the room and evident?  How may we bring to the center those who are at the margins?  How may we de-center those who are privileged?  What of ourselves do we not see?”

Click this link to read Rev. John Gibbons’s full text

Click this link to watch the full service on YouTube

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